>> If I buy a ladder,
>
> If someone has spent some time coming up with a novel design (eg those
> ones that collapse and fold 10 different ways) then you're probably not
> allowed to make copies and sell it. You can claim it's your ladder as
> much as you want, but you don't own the IP for it.

Well, that's the fundamental difference, really.

Designing a car may be difficult, but *building* one is also absurdly 
difficult. Almost nobody would bother to buy a BWM, copy its design, 
build a hundred of them and give them to all their friends for free. The 
materials and equipment required cost a fortune. (Not to mention the 
fact that it would be *easier* to design a car from scratch than try to 
copy an existing design that you don't have the plans for.)

For "content", the IP *is* the product. Which is a problem, since it's 
trivially copyable.

> Exactly, the laws are there to allow people to make investments knowing
> that they will be able to profit from their work. This goes for
> everything from music and art through to designing cars and phones.
> Without such laws it would be a waste of money to try and develop
> something as you'd never be able to get enough money in return.

Indeed. If you sit down and watch something like the making of Pirates 
of the Caribbean, you start to realise _why_ it cost 140 *million* USD 
to make it. No sane person is going to spend that kind of money unless 
they're expecting to make some kind of a return on that investment.

It used to be that music, video and so forth were all analogue, and it 
was difficult to make decent quality copies, and impractical to 
distribute them. Oh, if there was a profit in it, somebody would have 
done it, which is why it was illegal.

Today, if you wanted to, you could film your cat sleeping or something, 
and have it distributed to a thousand million viewers within minutes. It 
costs virtually nothing.

Hence, we arrive at the fundamental problem: It is trivially easy to 
copy and distribute digital data. However, some of this digital data is 
copyrighted work, who's creators (quite reasonably) expect you to pay 
for it. Others simply reason "why pay if I can get it for free?"

But then of course, the publishers think "OK, well if we embed this 
computer program, we can stop people copying it". (Actually no, no you 
cannot. But the CEO probably isn't smart enough to comprehend this.) And 
then /some/ of them start thinking "hey, instead of just stopping people 
doing illegal stuff, we could stop them doing legal stuff too, and 
charge them money for the privilege that used to be free".

(And then of course the other side reacts, and they break the DRM, and 
the publishers come up with new, more inflexible DRM, and the whole 
thing spirals out of control...)

I have no problem with content creators expecting a return on their 
investment. But I object to DRM, on a number of grounds. (Point #1 being 
"it doesn't work".) I have literally no idea what the solution is; the 
only workable one I can think of is "don't bother producing new 
content", but I *really* hope that's not the solution that everybody 
settles on... (!)

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